The Promise Of Air Part 6

And the feeling in him that everything flowed and nothing was stationary was strong. He dealt in shooting ideas, not in dead, photographic detail.

He flashed from one subject to another; flowed through all categories, ancient and modern; skimmed the cream off current tendencies, and swept above the knowledge of the day with a bird's-eye view, unburdened by fact or argument.

Of late, moreover, he had enjoyed these curious upside-down and inside-out experiences, because he had filled himself to the saturation point, and become, as it were, stationary. He could hold no more without a change.

He stopped. He took a snapshot photograph of himself, realised that he existed as a separate, vital ent.i.ty, and thenceforward watched himself expectantly to see what the change was going to be, for he knew he would not stay still. Hitherto he had been mechanical, whereas now he was an engine capable of self-direction--an engine stoked to the brim. When the air is at the saturation point, the tiniest additional percentage of moisture causes rain to fall. It's the final straw that makes the camel pause. So with Joseph Wimble. He was ready to discharge.

And it was this chance remark of his under-ground wife asking who the widow _was_ that took the photograph, and made him say, 'I am.'

All he had read was included in the affirmation. The epitomes had become part of his consciousness. Like the weary camel, like the moisture tired of balancing in the air, he wanted to sit down now and consider.

His daughter's longing for the country was his too. And it was she who now brought out all this.

At dinner that night in a West End restaurant near Piccadilly Circus he broached the subject and listened patiently to his wife's objections.

'What's the good, even if we had the means, Joe? Burying ourselves like that.'

Joan hopped, as it were. She recognised her mother's instinctive dread that she would go under ground or under water and never come up again.

'None of the nice people, the county families, would call. There'd only be the vicar and the local doctor, or p'r'aps a gentleman-farmer or two.

We know much better cla.s.s in town, and there's always chances of getting to know better still. Besides, who'd there be for Joan? The girl wouldn't have a look-in, simply. And the winters are so sloppy in a country cottage. Think of the Sundays. And the chickens and pigs I really couldn't abide, and howling winds at night, and owls in the eaves, and rats in the attics. You see, we'd have no standing at all.'

'But just a week-end cottage, Mother,' Joan put in, 'just a place of flowers and orchards and a little stream to flit down to overnight, so to say--_that_ now you'd like, wouldn't you?'

'Oh, that's different,' she said more brightly, 'only that's not what father means. He means a place to live in altogether. The week-end idea is right enough. That's what everybody does who can afford to--a bungalow on the Thames. But that means more money than we shall ever see, and even for that you want to keep a motor or a horse and dog-cart, or a little steam launch to get about in. Then the handy places are very expensive, and we couldn't go very far because of Tom. Tom could come down and bring his friends if it was near enough.'

'Grandfather might give us a little nest cheap,' suggested Joan.

She didn't 'see' Tom in the cottage.

But mother turned up her nose as she sipped her gla.s.s of Asti Spumante that accompanied the west-end dinner by way of champagne. She didn't approve of Norfolk.

'There's no society,' she said. 'It's flat and chilly. Your grandfather only stays there because there's the business to keep going. If we ever did such a thing as to move to the country, it'd have to be the Surrey pinewoods or the Thames.'

She looked across the table questioningly at her husband. The music played ragtime. The waiters bustled. There was movement and excitement in the air about them. Joe looked quite distinguished in his evening dress, and she felt proud and distinguished herself. She only wished he were a publisher. Still, no one need feel ashamed of being interested in the book line. Literature was not a trade.

'Some place, yes, where the country's really alive,' he agreed. 'I don't want to vegetate any more than you do, dear, I can a.s.sure you.'

'Nor I, mother,' laughed Joan. 'I simply want to fly about all the time.'

'Joan,' was the reply, half reproachfully, 'you always talk as if we kept you in a cage at home. The more you fly the better we like it; I only say choose places worth flying to----'

Her husband interrupted abruptly.

'It was nothing but a little dream of my own, really,' he said lightly.

'A castle in the air, a flash of country in the brain.' He laughed and called the waiter.

'Black, white, or Turkish?' he asked his wife. 'And what liqueur, dear?'

'Turkish and Grand Marnier,' was the prompt reply, and she would have said '_fine champagne_' only felt uncertain how _fine_ should be p.r.o.nounced.

They sipped their coffee and talked of other things. It was no good, this speculative talk, it was too much in the air.

The key of mother's mind was always: Who _was_ she? What'll _they_ say?

She lived underground, using the worn old narrow routes. Joan and her father made their own pathways in the trackless air. During the remainder of the evening they kept to the earth beside mother.

That night in the poky flat, after the girl had gone to bed, Mrs. Wimble observed to her husband:

'Do you know, Joe, I think a little change _would_ do her a lot of good.

She's getting restless here, and seems to take to n.o.body. Why not take her with you sometimes on your literary trips?'

This was her name for his journeys to provincial booksellers, or when sent to interview one of the Primer writers upon some practical detail.

'If we could afford it,' he replied.

'Father might help,' she said, showing that she had considered the matter already. 'It would be good for her--educational, I mean.'

Her husband agreed, and they fell asleep on that agreement.

A few days later a reply was received from Mrs. Wimble's father, the corn-chandler in Norfolk, enclosing a cheque for 20 pounds 'as a starter.'

The parents were delighted. Joan preened her wings and began at once her short flying journeys about the country with her father. He avoided the Commercial Traveller Hotels and took her to little Inns, where they were very cosy together. They went from Norfolk to the edge of Wales.

She acquired a bird's-eye knowledge of the map of Southern England.

These short trips gave her somehow the general 'feel' of the various counties, each with its different 'note,' in much the same way as the Primers gave her father his surface impression of England's mental condition. She noticed and remembered the living arteries which are rivers, he the streams of thought and theory which are tendencies.

The two maps were shown and explained, and each was wonderfully alert in understanding the other's meaning. The girl drank in her father's knowledge, while he in his turn 'felt' the country as a dancing sheet beneath them, flowing, liquid, alive. A new language grew into existence between them, a kind of shorthand, almost a symbol language.

They realised it first when talking of their journeys at the dinner-table, and Mrs. Wimble looked puzzled. Her face betrayed anxiety; she asked perplexed questions, looking up at them as a badger might look up at wheeling pigeons from the opening of its hole. Mentally she turned tail and dived out of sight below ground, where, with her feet on solid earth, her back and sides touching material that did not yield, she felt more at home, the darkness comforting and safe. Her husband and Joan flew too near the sun. It dazzled her. They could have talked for hours without her catching the drift, only they were far too fond of her to do so.

They resented going underground with her, but they came down and settled on earth, folded their wings, used words instead of unintelligible chirrupings, and chatted with her through the opening of the hole.

One afternoon, then, in Chester, they received a telegram from her that, for a moment, stopped the flow of things, though immediately afterwards the rush went on with greater impetus than ever.

Father pa.s.sed away peacefully return at once funeral to-morrow Swaffham.

And the family found itself with a solid little income of its own, free to fly and settle where it would.

CHAPTER VI

Nothing showed more vividly the peculiarity of Joan's unearthly airiness than the way in which the death affected her. It was the first time the great thing all talk about but none realise until they touch it, had come near her. It gave her a feeling of insecurity. She felt the solid earth--so called--unreal. Not that she had a feather of affection for her mother's father. She regarded him as a second-rate animal of prey, like a jackal, and always shrank when he was near. There was something 'sticky'

in him; she cla.s.sed him with her father's father, earthy, but not 'clean-earthy'; muddy rather. But that an earthy person could disappear in such a way made her feel shaky. If _he_ couldn't stay on the earth, who could?

Outwardly, and according to the newspapers, he had died rather well, leaving money to hospitals and waif Societies; but, inwardly, he had died in deep disgrace, a bankrupt soul with a heavy overdraft at the bank.

He had been a self-seeker of that notorious kind that achieves worldly success without much thought for others. Now that he was gone, mother declared he was a hero, father denounced him privately as ign.o.ble,--and their daughter divined secretly that he was a jackal.

His record, however, has nothing to do with this story, and is mentioned only because his departure affected the members of his family.

Mother wept and pasted the obituary notices from the Norfolk papers in a book; father soothed her with 'earth to earth, my dear, you know,' and Joan remarked beneath her breath 'he belongs there, he never really left it.' And felt an entirely new sensation.

For death puzzled her. She realised it as a fact in her own life--she, too, would come to an end, stop, go out. Yet that life could come to an end astonished her; she simply didn't believe it. In her own queer way she looked into the odd occurrence. The corn-chandler's death had raised a dust; but it was an unjustifiable disappearance somehow; once the dust settled she would surely see how and why it was unjustifiable. He would still be on the earth. But the dust did not settle, the chandler did not come back. He was beneath the earth. The feeling of insecurity remained in her. Earth, evidently, was not her element.

She envisaged then suddenly a delightful thing, and possibly being a mere child still, in spite of her years, she actually believed it. It was wondrous enough anyhow to be worth believing. For it occurred to her that the body of earth went back merely to its own, earth to earth, sweetly, naturally, while Something that had used that bit of earth, borrowing it, was set free. It--that marvellous Something--likewise returned to its own element--air. 'The airy part--that's me--flies off, if it's there at all.' Only grandfather had made the mistake of identifying himself with his borrowed earth, so he was finished and done with. Mother had the same downward tendency. If she wasn't careful, she would be finished and done with too. It was a matter of choice. But how could they? How could any one? She and her father 'knew different'--it was mother's phrase--and identified themselves with the airy part that was the reality.

She looked the thing in the face as well as she could, trying to hold it steady for a photograph. Death, to her mind, seemed to photograph the life it put an end to. The long series of acts and movements ceased.

There came an abrupt full stop. Like a photograph this was somewhere, somehow, false. Wings folded for the last time; air failed for ever; there was a sudden drop to earth. Her grandfather, whom death had photographed, had gone, yet surely only gone--elsewhere; his record in the world of men and women was his att.i.tude in the photograph; he was posing elsewhere now, but even he had not really stopped. Her little Song of Being did not mention anything of the sort. 'Flow, fly--stop! Wherever I am--I drop!' was merely wrong. A living thing could never end. It could neither drop nor stop. Some one had made a big mistake about death.

She felt insecure.